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Interview by Andrew Byers The scholar urges the church to stop neglecting Jesus’ prayer book. N. T. Wright wants to see today’s media-saturated church shaped anew by a form of worship and prayer that has shaped the people of God for centuries. In The Case for the Psalms: Why They Are Essential (HarperOne) the churchman […]

Book Review: Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision Reviewed by Ben Witherington It is never an easy thing to write a rebuttal book if you are genuinely a Christian person. You keep hoping that people will stop misunderstanding what you have said and written, will think better of ad hominem attacks, and you keep trying the ‘turn […]

In his new book, The Great Awakening, Jim Wallis describes how as a young man growing up in an evangelical church, he never heard a sermon on the Sermon on the Mount. That telling personal observation reflects a phenomenon about which I have been increasingly concerned: that much evangelical Christianity on both sides of the Atlantic […]

The Moule Memorial Lecture. Originally delivered on Thursday, June 5, 2008. Introduction Thank you for your welcome, and for the invitation to give this lecture, which of course makes me both sad and proud. Sad because Charlie’s death last autumn was not only a defining moment, the end of an era, but for me, as […]

When I was an undergraduate, I read a book called Clarity Is Not Enough. It challenged the prevailing linguistic philosophy which said less and less with more and more precision. Yes, we have to think and speak accurately, otherwise we go round in circles, but philosophy must be about something – life, meaning, ethics, truth. […]

Closing address to the meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council When I heard that you had been studying Acts in your time together, my mind went, for some reason, to acronyms. I imagined myself coming to address the Anglican Communion Theological Society, or perhaps the Anglican Council for Tea and Sympathy, which goodness knows you […]

Delivered at Auburn Avenue Presbyterian Church (Monroe, Louisiana) Lecture 1: Starting Points and Opening Reflections Introduction Thank you for your warm welcome and generous hospitality. It is an enormous pleasure for Maggie and myself to be here in Monroe for the first time. I am particularly grateful to those who have worked very hard to […]

Interview by Douglas LeBlanc Top theologian on Lambeth Commission talks about what happened behind the scenes, whether the report should have been tougher, and why it’s critical of some conservative bishops. N.T. Wright is the rare sort of theologian who attracts respect from both conservatives and liberals. He became Bishop of Durham in 2003, and for the […]

Originally published in Studia Liturgica 2002, 32, 176–195. Reproduced by permission of the author. Introduction “Biblical worship” is a huge topic, and one on which I am not really qualified. I am neither a liturgist, nor a liturgiologist. I am simply a New Testament scholar working in a community whose daily life is structured around public and corporate worship, […]

Originally published in Authenticating the Activities of Jesus, ed. Bruce Chilton and Craig A. Evans, Leiden: Brill, 1999, 83–120. Reproduced by permission of the author. Looking for Jesus People have been looking for Jesus for a long time, but never quite like this. The “Quest of the Historical Jesus” has been proceeding, in fits and starts, […]

Written in Reflections, vol. 2, 1998 If Paul’s answer to Caesar is the empire of Jesus, what is an empire under the rule of this new lord? How does Paul’s gospel line up with Caesar’s empire? I am honoured to be lecturing in this famous institution, and my wife and I are deeply grateful for the […]

How an infant in a cow shed overturns the brute force of Caesar. By the time Jesus was born, Augustus had already been monarch for a quarter of a century. King of kings, he ruled from Gibraltar to Jerusalem and from Britain to the Black Sea. He had done what no one had done for […]

Originally published in SBL 1985 Seminar Papers, pp. 75–95. Reproduced by permission of the author. I Like naughty children whispering after a command to silence, and then, greatly daring, talking openly and with increasing volume, New Testament scholars, so long forbidden to talk about Jesus of Nazareth, have begun in the last decade to do so […]

Excerpt from The Great Acquittal: Justification by Faith and Current Christian Thought. Reproduced by permission of the author. Introduction: The Shape of the Doctrine Imagine asking a jeweller to describe a watchspring. He might simply talk about the spring itself: he might demonstrate how it was related to the rest of the mechanism: he might even […]